Hi all,
But that's not the topic of the recent thread.
So I'm changing the subject... :-)
What WS-RF and WS-Transfer and REST are doing is require that each message be directed to only one resource. As a result, when it comes to defining groups of resources, additional resources (representing collections) have to be created. Populating and managing the collections require additional messages.
I think your email misses the point of the current discussion.
Of course, as you point out, if I have a handle of some sort for a job (a WS-Addressing EPR, as in WSRF/WS-Transfer, or a job-id, as you advocate below), then I can include several of these in a request to the job factory asking for some operation to be performed on them all. I don't believe that anyone's debating that.
I think that a *part* of this discussion can be summarized as "what is the level of abstraction of the interfaces you use"? Which between a low-level resource-oriented (probably per-resource) interface and a high-level abstract interface is the best one? My answer so far is "both". You want to deal both with resources ("deploy this OS on this specific host"), and to have a high-level interface ("start me these zillion jobs, wherever and whenever suitable"). Operations in the high-level interface will generate operations in the low-level interfaces (when you start a job with the high-level one, you might deploy the OS beforehand). The high-level interface might show some of the operations of the low-level interface ("what is the state of this specific job?"). Which takes me to the execution management in OGSA. We are now doing the container, which for me seems to be a resource with low-level interfaces (not as low as the bare metal though). But I think the container's interfaces, while needed, are not the high-level interfaces yet, and these too are needed. Do you have any wisdom (*) on this issue, for OGSA as a whole? BTW, the issue above applies to other OGSA capabilities also. By the way, I'm not including angle brackets, SOAP and WSA issues on the above. What will be put in resource properties is affected, but I'm not going down to these details yet. Regards, Fred Maciel. (*) No conscious reference to WSDM intended, only subconscious and subliminal ones :-).